Oppression will always breed different forms of mobilization and organizing, protest and resistance. Building a historical memory of Puerto Rican str… - Edna Acosta-Belén

It was from these friendships and the multiple fronts of activism of what we now call the Puerto Rican Movement that I was able to solidify my own emerging research and teaching interests in the process of unveiling new decolonial knowledge about women and the Puerto Rican diaspora. The social and political movements that bourgeoned within the stateside Puerto Rican communities in the late 1960s and 1970s allowed many island Puerto Ricans who migrated to New York during those years to reach a better understanding of the conditions, hardships, and survival and liberation struggles afflicting the hundreds of thousands migrants who had settled in the city during the previous decades. In the frontlines of these struggles were the Young Lords Organization (later transformed into the Young Lords Party and the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization), the Puerto Rican Student Union (PRSU), El Comité, and Resistencia Puertorriqueña, to name a few. Although their primary sphere of action was New York City, their fighting spirit and claims for social justice rapidly spread to other US cities with large concentrations of Puerto Ricans. These groups carried the banners of struggle and resistance on behalf of impoverished and disenfranchised stateside communities where Puerto Rican migrants had settled and for the liberation of Puerto Rico.

How the past is unveiled and represented by an oppressed group or community is an essential component of constructing a collective historical memory that inspires their present and future spheres of activism and resistance. Building a historical memory, however, is always a rugged and convoluted terrain of contesting claims, but moreso for those populations that have endured the coloniality of being silenced and are seeking to voice their untold stories and, in this way, contribute to the production of new decolonial knowledge.

The word palante (a colloquial abbreviated version of the Spanish phrase para adelante, meaning moving forward) was a call to revolutionary action and the battle cry of the Young Lords. The rallying term was also adopted as the title of their bimonthly newspaper, which rapidly made its way to the streets of our communities, the offices of many agencies and organizations, and the halls of our schools and universities.